Hale County Ceramics School
[Broken Machines]
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The fields are organic as the whole, and of the their own nature, and of the work that is poured into them: the spring, the garden, the out-buildings, are organic to the house itself.
– James Agee, 1936
This project began with the Panopticon, the powerful poetry of isolation, and a personal connection with the region of Appalachia. Through the extraction of an artistic conscience, the project became the study of site, poverty, and the creation of an architecture based on the Literature of James Agee and the photography of Walker Evans during the Depression Era.
A new magnet school for Hale County, Alabama begins to deconstruct the machine typology of contemporary institutions while allowing Agee and Evans to become the co-authors of a new hypothetical architecture. For it was on this site that these two journalists once lived with tenant farmers, settling in as “cold-laboring spy’s” and in turn sharing both the desolate beauty and agonizing pain of this place with the rest of the nation. Primarily, the project investigates the idea of the ‘gaze’ as a way of defining constructed space for students to further understand a physical and cultural setting.
Advisor: Brian Ambroziak
